EP 3 – Den Jones Chats with the IDSA’s Julie Smith

Speaker 1:

Hello, and welcome to Get it Started, Get it Done. The Banyan Security podcast covering the security industry and beyond. In this episode, our host and Banyan’s Chief Security Officer, Den Jones speaks with Julie Smith. Julie is the executive director of the Identity Defined Security Alliance and has more than 25 years experience in technology products and service companies, including extensive experience in the identity and security industries. Den and Julie discuss among other topics, the importance of vendor neutral advice and education, the roles of identity and security and Identity Management Day 2022, which will be held on April 12th. Links for registration are in the description. We hope you enjoy Den’s discussion with Julie Smith.

Den Jones:

Hey, everybody. Welcome to Get it Started, Get it Done with me your host, Den Jones, and then each show we’ve got great guests joining us. And this week it is Julie Smith from the Identity Defined Security Alliance. We’ll let her introduce herself in a minute. And what we want to cover is really the premise behind this as mentioned before, is how do people get started in whatever their endeavor is? How do they make progress? How do they get it done? And along the way, we’ll throw in some sparkly questions. So welcome Julie.

Julie Smith:

Thanks Den. Appreciate you having me on your show.

Den Jones:

Thank you. So, hey, Julie, just for the audience. Could you explain a little bit about your background and what is the IDSA?

Julie Smith:

Yeah, sure. So my background, and I guess I’ll speak to it specifically, and in terms of how I got involved with the IDSA. I’ve been in technology, I stumbled into it early on in my career and ended up after a number of years, which I won’t give away at Ping Identity. And that was in 2008, so that was really my first entry into the whole identity space. I went in as product manager, ended up in product marketing eventually. One of the things that in product marketing and really product management we always struggle with is who’s our audience? Who are we talking to? Who’s the most likely person to buy our technologies?

Julie Smith:

And at the time it was again, 2008, Identity’s just really exploding because we’re having a financial crisis and people are adopting cloud rapidly, and how do they manage access to those cloud applications? And so this idea of who do we talk to? Do we talk to operations? Do we talk to the IT people? Never were we talking to the security people. And fast forward a little bit, and all of a sudden now we start to see breaches happening and they’re related to compromised identities. Bad guys got a hold of a username and password.

Julie Smith:

And this I think starts hitting in around 2015, something like that. We’re starting to see the Verizon data breach incident report talking about compromised identities is the leading cause of hacking related breaches. So this identity security connection started to hit. I’m still working at Ping Identity at the time. And we’re talking just about how do we get the perspective of the security folks? How do we get in the door talking to them? And so that is what started my identity security connection thought.

Julie Smith:

I took some time off, went and traveled for a bit, had a good time, and then came back and worked for a big company based here in Denver, Colorado called Optiv, which was all about so security, security, security, security, not much about identity. And so now I’m on the flip side. And as worlds have a tendency to collide, I came into a role where we were working with Ping Identity on a… Basically, what it was is integration program.

Julie Smith:

And so Ping was working on this concept called Identity Defined Security, pulled together some partners, said, “Hey, this is something we really ought to try and focus on. It’s a problem. Security people really need to know more about identity and the risk that are out there.” People like you, Den. And that’s how I got involved in something called the Identity Defined Security Alliance, which at the time was, I would say an exclusive club and then stayed involved with it for a couple of years.

Julie Smith:

And we established a board, we invited more vendors into the club. Some of those competed with Ping and in late 2018, or really 2019, we decided to spin it out as its own entity and really elevated up to a very vendor neutral educational trade association if you will, trying to provide lots of great research, vendor neutral advice and again, just staying on this theme of how do we get security people, excuse me, more in tune with the risks of identity related breaches. That was a lot of words, wasn’t it?

Den Jones:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that’s awesome. And I think if I recall right, you and I met round about and 2018, Identiverse in Boston. Is that right?

Julie Smith:

Yeah. That’s right. I think a mutual friend, maybe Steven Lee put us in touch?

Den Jones:

Yeah.

Julie Smith:

Yeah. And Steven was on our board and he said, “Hey, you got to meet this guy, Den, he’s doing some cool stuff. And it ties in exactly with what the mission of the IDSA is. And he’s a character, has a great personality, would definitely be somebody that could help contribute and spread the word.

Den Jones:

Yeah. Yeah. And Steven is… I’m still talking with him today. He’s a great guy. And then what do you remember from our meeting the first time? I seem to remember there was alcohol involved, a bit of baseball and a very nervous Julie.

Julie Smith:

Yeah. Very for sure. I think the first time we met face-to-face was probably in the bar at the restaurant, or at the hotel where the conference was being… If I remember, right. So that was early in the afternoon. And that was our first face-to-face meeting. We sat down and had a drink. And then as those conferences go, there was a baseball game that night. I couldn’t tell you who the Red Sox played, I know that it was at Fenway. I know the Red Sox played somebody else and we ended up crossing paths, I think at event at Fenway that night where I was a little concerned about what your condition might be, because I believe our session was the next morning at like 8:00 AM.

Den Jones:

Yeah. It was.

Julie Smith:

If I’m not mistaken.

Den Jones:

Yeah. It was early.

Julie Smith:

Yeah.

Den Jones:

I remember that.

Julie Smith:

It was, it was a late night and it was going to be an early morning. And here’s this guy that I’ve just met, who seems to be the life of the party, we’ll call you. Knows everybody, chatting everybody up, having a good time. And yeah, that made me a little bit nervous about what 8:00 AM was going to look like the next morning for our session.

Den Jones:

And then I do recall a little bit of a practical joke the next morning where you were wondering where I was, and one of my colleagues came up and I think was asking you if you’d even seen me and he was making that up that I was missing in action.

Julie Smith:

Yeah. And we’ve talked about this before, and I think there might have even been a text message from you as well. It’s like 7:45, “Hey, I’m still like 20 minutes away from the conference I should be there. What room are we in again?” And I think you were just pretty much out in the hall, but yeah. I have a tendency to get a little anxious on things like that. And you were feeding into that anxiety for sure.

Den Jones:

Yeah. Yeah. That was the plan. I think was… it’s fun for me because I tapped into you being really nervous while we’re at the baseball game and the next morning we were having coffee and walking towards the conference and I just remember saying to my colleague, I’m like, “Oh, we should play a bit of a joke on Julie here because I know she’s really anxious on this.” And we were literally outside the room.

Julie Smith:

Thanks Den. Thanks.

Den Jones:

But I do remember, I remember the talk went very well. I remember we had some good audience participation and people were coming up to us afterwards. And so from that perspective, I don’t think they suspected for one minute what happened the night before. I don’t think the audience knew that.

Julie Smith:

Yeah. I’m sure they didn’t. Actually, the interesting thing about that conference, So that’s 2018. We had just established a board for the IDSA. We were trying to find our way, and the way that session went down. So you guys did an awesome job. I was nervous because I always am. You guys did an awesome job and then after the fact there was a group of practitioners huddled around saying, “Hey, can you show me what you guys are doing?”

Julie Smith:

And it’s a hard thing to do. But that was the catalyst for, “Can we create an online community? Is there a way for us to take that interaction, that sharing and the show intel and ‘Hey, this is how we did it. And this is what worked and this is what didn’t.’ Could we take that online and turn it into an online community?” And I know you and I have had lots of conversations about how to do this. It’s way harder.

Den Jones:

Yeah. It’s way harder.

Julie Smith:

It’s so hard. I think we’re making progress, but yeah, it’s definitely a hard thing to do. But that was just… You’re right. After that whole session, it was amazing because you had a line I think behind you wanting to better understand what you guys have been doing.

Den Jones:

Yeah. I don’t think I had the line. I think Carlos, he had the line.

Julie Smith:

Well, yeah.

Den Jones:

They wanted to talk to the smart one, not the guy that knows how to use PowerPoint. They wanted to know how Zero Trust was really done as opposed to how it was done on a slide.

Julie Smith:

Yeah. Fair point.

Den Jones:

Yeah. And it’s funny. So we actually met people from Cisco and that company that I later joined and then we deployed Zero Trust again at Cisco with many of the people that we’d met and across our team so yeah, we had some great experiences between the Adobe Experience. And then we went to Cisco and done the same Experience there, different technology. And this is one thing about the IDSA. You’re trying to look at it a way that’s vendor neutral and vendor agnostic.

Den Jones:

And you can say, “Look, there’s principles behind these things.” And some of these vendors they are interchangeable. But the biggest thing that I was always trying to tell people is, “Well, you’ve already got investments.” You don’t embark down a path and say, “Well, I want to deliver this outcome.” But then suddenly say, “And I’d like to rip out the three things I just bought last year.” That’s not your goal. So as part of the IDSA, what would you say is the pitch when you’re talking to vendors who want to join the IDSA? What would you say the pitch is that you usually use for those guys?

Julie Smith:

To the vendors, huh? Yeah.

Den Jones:

Yeah.

Julie Smith:

It’s the vendor neutrality, because I think that’s a good thing. I think customers want that vendor neutrality. I think they want the advice that is not grounded and I’m trying to sell you this widget. So I talk about… Vendors are all about leads, especially when I’m talking to the… It’s interesting. When I’m talking to the marketing folks within a potential member company, it’s all about the leads. How is this going to generate leads for me? And that’s a hard thing to answer, although we’ve done some things to try and do that and provide that benefit back to the vendor company.

Julie Smith:

Because this is really not about that. This is about a thought leadership. It’s about education, it’s about making their customer base smarter. And so when I talk to more the thought leader or the strategy folks inside the vendors, they totally get that. They are coming from that perspective. We want our customers to be smarter about this. We want to basically have IDSA help reduce our sales cycle and indirectly send customers to us for our technologies. But at the end of the day, it’s about helping them solve problems regardless of how they get that done.

Julie Smith:

And that’s why you’re so valuable in this. Just because what you mentioned a minute ago, it’s all about not necessarily the pieces and parts you put together to get something done, but what is it you’re trying to do? And what’s the business value it’s going to provide back to the organization. And then, can we do it with what we have? That should absolutely be the number one way we achieve our goals.

Den Jones:

Yeah. And it’s interesting because I always think of it like vendors always want is to get sales, right? So they’re in business to make money. But the reality is, and this is the first time I’ve been on this side of the house, I was always a customer. So I joined Banyan, now I’m on the what we’ll call the dark side.

Julie Smith:

Yeah. Right.

Den Jones:

And I’m sitting there listening to the sales guys and the marketing people and SQLs and other QLS and I’m QL-ed out really. And at the end of it, I’m like, “So it’s qualified lead.” I’m like, “I don’t know if I care about that.” But I really care about as a practitioner. And what I cared about as a customer is, I really want to help raise the bar in the education. I would love people and I think you hit the nail on the head.

Den Jones:

If you can get customers that the minute they start working with you, they already know enough about the market. They know enough about the integrations because if you’re a Zero Trust company like Banyan, that’s cool. But the reality is we’re not an island. We have to integrate with the Oktas. We might integrate with the CyberArks, the SailPoints, the whomever, whomever, whomever. And it shouldn’t matter if it’s Ping Identity or if it’s Okta or if it’s [inaudible 00:15:40], we should still have a way to work with your identity provider of choice.

Den Jones:

So I’d love to be in a situation where vendors invest the partnership here with the IDSA, with the thinking that it’s all about education and it’s all about making sure our customers they’re smarter, they ask the right questions. Because we meet so many customers and I know this when I would talk to vendors before, if I’m not asking the right questions, why don’t you educate me on what the right question is? But I ideally for me and the team, we do research first.

Den Jones:

We understand what good questions look like before you go waste the time of any of the vendors because I don’t want to speak to 10 vendors about, “I should have learned that eight don’t do it already.” And a lot of that information’s out there. So that’s pretty cool. Now I was fortunate enough to be invited and join the customer advisory board. So when you’ve got people on the customer advisory board, what’s the expectation for those people?

Julie Smith:

Yeah. So they’re busy. That’s the one thing I think, I knew that going into it but I don’t know that I knew to what extent they were busy. So I think the way it’s turned down and the original intent, or maybe a little bit different, I had hoped that… Now, you’re an exception. In lots of ways Den, let’s be honest, but-

Den Jones:

Sometimes.

Julie Smith:

… you’re an exception in that you are able to roll up your sleeves and spend time and get your hands dirty and help invent some of the advice if you will, that we’re creating. And so I think that was my original vision and there are definitely only some that given what’s going on in their world at any given time that have dedicated that roll up the sleeve hands-on. So that’s one way that I try and use the customer advisory board.

Julie Smith:

And again, some are busier than others. So get down and really help us. Give us that voice of the customer, give us that real perspective on what we’re doing. Whether it’s good or not, or whether it reflects reality or not. So the other side of it is the speaking. These guys and girls are fabulous at sharing their stories and advocating for us. And so that’s really how I’ve ended up using the customer advisory board in a bigger capacity is to help spread the word. They’re all executives, they’re smart, articulate, and so with Identity Management Day coming up, there’s a number of them that are participating in various sessions during the virtual conference.

Julie Smith:

And you’ll see if you attend, which hopefully you register, you’ll see that these are super smart people and they’re very passionate about security and securing their organizations, but also about the role of Identity. So they fit directly with the charter, but they all have more of a security bent, which is I think really important. And sometimes the Identity people talk in an echo chamber a little bit. And so really what we’re trying to do is get more voices talking about that intersection of identity and security and having leaders in the security world is one way that we’ve done it and through the customer advisory board. So it’s been awesome there. It’s a great group of people and yeah.

Den Jones:

Yeah. And it’s funny. I know in my case, it’s almost like there’s been times would’ve been engaged and then times would’ve done the best for [inaudible 00:19:27] and have been gone. And I know that always really depends on the change in your circumstances. I changed jobs. I took on a new role. I took on a big role. And at that point, I’ve done a disappearing act. And I think most of the people that get involved from the customer side, it’s like that because you have a day job.

Den Jones:

So the intention than the desire is you want to be helpful and get involved. And the reality is you’re grabbing another slice of time to participate. I’m really fortunate now, as in the role I have right now, that I’m unable to get a little bit more involved than I did in my last role. And that’s a bit of a blessing for me because ultimately, getting to speak to more practitioners and you touched on one point, which is identity is one piece of the puzzle. And even within the IAM space, whether it’s Privileged Identity, identity management and IGA, or whether it’s directory services authentication, privilege goes to bastion hosts, how do these things then tie back into your remote access solution?

Den Jones:

All of these things, they all intersect. But then you get into cloud security and how are we dealing with servers, computer and application security. So it all intersects. I think the things I’ve learned over the years, what I run at enterprise security teams, it wasn’t just Identity. Identity was one team of many teams and a compromise doesn’t occur then just suddenly sit in one stack. As you mentioned, years ago, people were like, “Compromises were network level attacks.” And really they’re identity level attacks and they’re social engineering and they’re phishing.

Den Jones:

And then they’re going to start to move laterally and ultimately for us, I think of Identity as now being, we are the front line of a lot of the security attacks. So it’s really important more now than ever. Now, here’s a couple things. So when you think of the success of IDSA and what is the future of the IDSA look like? Where do you see the IDSA evolving and what would you think done looks like?

Julie Smith:

That’s a good question. The cheeky answer to that is, well, there’s no more identity-related attacks. So the research that we do, the last one that says 79% of organizations have suffered an identity-related breach, that number goes to zero.

Den Jones:

Yeah.

Julie Smith:

Yeah. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Den Jones:

Or close to it. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Julie Smith:

Or close to it? Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s… Yeah, I don’t know that I have a solid answer for done. I will say that we’ve made some changes this year to try and bring more of the voice of the customer into what we do and that’s through some new membership types. So we have been a very vendor-driven organization in the past in terms of funding and contribution and that kind of thing. And so we just introduced this year, January, two new membership types that are focused on bringing practitioners more actively involved in what we do.

Julie Smith:

And the benefit to them is they get to spend time talking with incredibly smart people and working on best practices and advice that can then hopefully be used by everyone, but they also can get CPE credits towards their (ISC)², CISSP certification. And if they want to get their brand out there, if they want to network, if they want to speak, they have an opportunity to do that as well. So I think at least the next near term step is to really get more people active and involved, and more people that are actually in the trenches doing it.

Julie Smith:

And so if the bigger the organization gets, the more resources we have, it’s just continues to pile on. And if maybe at some point in time, there is a certification program specifically around identity-related security, identity defined security, that would be a fantastic addition in the future. But I think at this point we still have work to do, because there’s still breaches happening that in my opinion are related to really dumb things that organizations haven’t put in place.

Den Jones:

Yeah. A lot of-

Julie Smith:

So I think there’s still work to do.

Den Jones:

Yeah. And I think IDSA right now, correct? Keep me honest here, but I think it’s predominantly U.S. based right now. Most of the people that participate are based in the U.S., I’m not sure if there’s anyone outside of the U.S., but I could imagine IDSA growing to having global presence where we’ve got IDSA in Europe and IDSA in Asia and around the world, and having an organization where the reach is broader. Because I know with the internet you can post and publish online and the reach of broad, but the ability for people to come together as work groups and meetups and things like that is pretty strictly to whatever the pockets of the vendor members or the customer practitioners, whatever we are.

Den Jones:

And as you say, getting more people involved, more engaged. I could see there’d been a lot of opportunity there. So yeah, that would be pretty cool. And like you say, I once said to previous boss almost eliminate lateral movement. I would never have the guts to turn around and say, “Totally eliminate.” And I think for us with the identity-related breaches, if we’re not in the top 10 of the reasons, I think that would be in. I would take that in a heartbeat, so yeah.

Julie Smith:

Yeah. Isolate too. Yeah. So to your point, they get in, but they can’t do anything. And it’s all because we know who they are and we know that they’re doing bad things. So we’ve shut them down to a point where they’re done and they move on to something else.

Den Jones:

Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So one of the things as you’ve gone through this journey. What would you say has been one of the proudest moments of your career and what was the lesson you learned from that?

Julie Smith:

Oh wow. You didn’t tell me you were going to ask me that question. I would say last year was the first Identity Management Day. One of our vendor companies had this idea, “We need this day of awareness. We need everybody to focus on this problem.” Now, some people would say, “You need to focus on it every day, but why not try and rally the community to one day and share best practices.” And so I think last year, the first Identity Management Day was way bigger and more people involved than I ever imagined given it was the first one. And we pulled it together.

Julie Smith:

I think the lessons learn out of that is this is a big problem. And there’s people that you don’t think about that are paying attention to it or wanting to advocate or prioritizing it in their organizations that you may not have even thought about. And a lot of lessons learned coming into this year about how do we do a better job of getting more people involved? How do we make it bigger? How do we provide more education? And so this year’s Identity Management Day, and just in the last two weeks we turned what was going to be a series of sessions throughout the day into a true virtual conference.

Julie Smith:

And so super excited about that on April 12th, we’ve got different topics with an amazing… That’s the other interesting thing. I think one lesson… Not a lesson learned, but maybe something that surprised me through this whole thing is the number of people that are willing to contribute to something like this. And then, the connections that I’ve been able to make and that the organization has been able to make in the last couple of years. The lineup of speakers is phenomenal and I’m super excited about Identity Management Day.

Den Jones:

Yeah. It’s looking good. And yeah, last year I remember it was such a great success and everyone’s all nervous prior to the buildup. Will it be great or will it just be like this fizzled out thing that you wish you never done. But I look at it like, “Holy shit, this actually worked.”

Julie Smith:

Yeah.

Den Jones:

Kudos to you and the team. And I think this year we’ll hopefully see momentum based on last year’s event. And we’re recording the podcast before Identity Management Day and we expect this to be out probably the week before Identity Management Day. So for anyone who’s not registered or doesn’t see anything or hasn’t seen about it or heard about it, we’ll put some links in as part of the publication of the broadcast.

Den Jones:

But here’s a dreamy based question, Julie. So we’ve been doing COVID so everything’s virtual. So Identity Management, year three that day, do you see that being virtual or do you see that being physical in-person?

Julie Smith:

No.

Den Jones:

There’s an aspirational goal.

Julie Smith:

That is an aspirational goal. It’s possible next year or the year after we could do it an in-person event. Our partner National Cyber Security Alliance, they’re actually doing something that just happened to fall on April 12th, an in-person event in Phoenix. And it’s an education-based event down there. So maybe next year, maybe the year after that we could partner together the two organizations and turn this into a face-to-face event. That would be fantastic. That’s a lot of work. That’s a ton of work.

Den Jones:

That’s a ton of work.

Julie Smith:

Putting on a virtual conference is a lot of work, putting on an in-person conference, it’s just… Yeah. But yeah, that’d be a great goal. I love it. Let’s put it out there.

Den Jones:

That would be a great goal. And I think you may have a lot of vendor members that would love to sponsor such an event. So I don’t see why it couldn’t be funded, I guess. So maybe we need to go back to those vendor members and see if they’re interested in such a fun objective. So-

Julie Smith:

We should start now. Yeah, for sure.

Den Jones:

Yeah. Let’s start planting that seed and we’ll become good gardeners. Okay. So we started off with the proudest one. So let’s jump into a horror story. But what would you say is the worst thing that happened in your career?

Julie Smith:

In my career?

Den Jones:

And what did you learn from that? Yeah.

Julie Smith:

Oh, man, in my career, in my identity career?

Den Jones:

I’d say your whole career. I could tell you I’d done service management once for like six or seven years, and I’m not sure who was punishing me or why, but that was a tough gig.

Julie Smith:

Yeah. I went to work with some friends that I had met. I was at Arthur Andersen for the first 10 years of my career. And I went to work for a company with some buddies, which was great until it wasn’t. Until the people that I was tight with and who had brought me in had basically had a falling out with the leadership of the organization. And so as soon as that person lost favor, all of us who basically had the black mark on us because we were brought in and so we all got ousted.

Julie Smith:

The unfortunate part was that it happened in July of 2001. And normally I would have been relatively confident I could find a job quickly, but two months later the entire world went a completely different direction. So I was out of work for a year just because nobody was hiring during that time. I played a lot of golf, I went to the gym a lot, I stressed a lot. Yeah. So I think that was probably the worst time in my career. And it was a long stretch.

Den Jones:

Yeah. I remember those days and working in a company where we were starting to do layoffs and you’re always cutting costs and trying to save money here and there. And it was never fun. So I totally remember, in the Bay Area alone, I can’t remember like in then 2001, maybe 200,000 people suddenly on the streets looking for work. It was pretty… The virtual streets because they were using computers, but it was really, really tough times. But hey, glad you moved on from there now. So let’s jump into this. So then you get another job and you decide you’re going to celebrate your new found job that you just got. What’s the beverage of choice?

Julie Smith:

Wine for sure. And I don’t discriminate. So open with a bottle of Sparkling because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re celebrating. But then probably move into a nice Pinot noir after that.

Den Jones (33:48):

Awesome.

Julie Smith (33:49):

Californian Pinot noir is my favorite I would say because… Oregon and French, I think Oregon, no diss on Oregon or anything. There are some good ones there, but they’re not as hardy. They’re not as robust I think as the California Pinot Noir.

Den Jones (34:03):

Awesome. Yeah. I would usually start with sparkling if I’m going to celebrate, but then probably quickly I’m jumping into some Reds and then probably some gin and then maybe more gin and sometimes more gin there. An event eventually, ends up like the bottle there where it becomes like a candle holder. And I don’t think that bottle was opening finished in one night, but maybe a couple of nights. I don’t know. So I don’t remember actually, I don’t remember the opening and the finishing for some reason.

Julie Smith (34:39):

Well, and after a year of being out of work, there’s a high likelihood that there would’ve been multiple bottles of wine consumed that night.

Den Jones (34:48):

I can imagine. So one thing, so you mentioned going to the gym and stuff. Yeah. So when you’re not working, golfing, gym, so are those two of the favorite sports? And then I remember earlier you said travel. So what do you do for the rest and relaxation?

Julie Smith (35:08):

Yeah. Cycling, you throw cycling in there. At one point in my… I was going to say in my early career. My early athletic career, I was into Triathlons for a little while. I had to leave that behind and now just it’s about cycling, but that would be my other one. I think gym and cycling, and I’m a hiker, I’m a skier. I live in Colorado, so I do all the -ings. Skiing, hiking, cycling, all that kind of stuff, travel. Yeah. I love to travel. I’m actually itching to get somewhere, but that, I took some time off in between leaving Ping and ending up at Optiv.

Julie Smith (35:53):

And I was in Patagonia, and it’s all active. So it goes back to the ing in me. Hiking down in Patagonia, was in South Africa. I don’t know if safari-ing is an ing too.

Den Jones (36:06):

No, you can add an ing there. And then there’s drinking. That’s got an ing.

Julie Smith (36:11):

There’s drinking for sure in South Africa. Yeah. Yeah. Spent all time in St. Thomas and probably the craziest place I’ve been in my traveling is Bhutan, which is amazing. If anybody has an opportunity to visit the tiny little country that’s nestled between India and Nepal and Tibet. Amazing place.

Den Jones (36:35):

Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. I’m going to say I can’t wait to travel again, but I’ve done quite a bit of traveling already for work, but I can’t wait to travel for some pleasure and some vacation time. So that is definitely on the card sometimes soon. So-

Julie Smith (36:52):

What’s on your list, Den? Where would you go? What’s on your list?

Den Jones (36:55):

Well, I actually, I’ve done a trip around Asia in 2000, so I would love to do trip round Asia. I am going to go back to Europe. I haven’t seen family and friends back in Scotland, so I’m hoping to go there this summer. I’m planning on that. And then there are some places in Europe that I’ve not been to, like Santorini. I want to go there. That’s probably top of the list right now for Europe. I’ve done a lot of traveling around Europe before, because that’s where I’m from.

Den Jones (37:30):

So I’m looking forward to it. I’m a bit of a workaholic. So the hard thing for me is I want to work, I want to make sure what we’re doing at Banyan’s great and what my team are doing and what I’m doing’s great. And then I suddenly start to think about me, but usually that’s an afterthought. I’m great at preaching the work life balance. I’m great at telling everybody else to go get some vacation time on, or go do some training. And then I rarely think about me. So I got to add me more to that list. So yeah. Otherwise at some point it’s just all working, no fun. So yeah.

Den Jones (38:12):

Now, as we start to wrap up, I’ve got a couple of things. One is what would you like the audience to take a way of anything from our conversation today? What’s a one nugget you want to leave everyone with?

Julie Smith (38:27):

Never trust Den.

Den Jones (38:31):

Well, is that not what Zero Trust is all about?

Julie Smith (38:34):

Yeah. Yeah. I think check out the Identity Defined Security Alliance would be the thing. Especially, if your audience is the practitioner community, see what we’re up to, get involved, the more voices we have to amplify of back out, I think the better off will all be, so.

Den Jones (38:58):

Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I know for me personally, getting involved with it, it’s opened up several doors. As you mentioned earlier, there’s opportunities for speaking, writing blog posts, getting involved in and panels, contributing and even… There’s a lot of vendors are writing a lot of things as part of IDSA’s work. And then as a customer practitioner, I’ve been able to go in there and sanitize and question and say, “Well, is that really how it happens?”

Den Jones (39:33):

And I know that working with a vendor or now when I sit there with our marketing team and our sales team and I’ll sit there and say, “Yeah.” But if I was on the other side of that conversation, I’m the buyer, the person you’re trying to sell to, maybe that doesn’t sell so well for me. I’m not interested too much in that angle. So it’s always good it to have those conversations. And it’s very bizarre, first time in my career being on the other side of the fence.

Den Jones (40:07):

So I think what I’ve experienced with the IDSA, it’s been a great bunch of people getting to work with and been exposed to. There’s been so some really cool events and opportunities. And I think of it from a career building perspective, there’s an opportunity to grow your career as part of the involvement, so it’s not one thing or the other. So, Julie, thank you very much for your time today, it’s been a blast getting through catch up.

Den Jones (40:38):

As we wrap up this show, I just want to remind everyone. We do have some great guests. So first of all, thank you very much to this great guest, Julie, appreciate you being on the show. And the next guest for the episode four is one of my good friends, Elvis. And Elvis, as you will hear in episode four is not a singer. He’s a good friend of mine from the FBI, and he’s going to join us. And we can’t tell you what we’re going to talk about because that’s all government secret stuff. But so the show is either going to be one minute long, because it’s all redacted or it could be like one hour, we don’t know. But thank you very much everybody, stay tuned and we’ll see you again soon.

Speaker 1 (41:22):

Thanks for listening to learn more about Banyan Security and find future episodes of the podcast. Please visit us at banyansecurity.io. Special thanks to Urban Punks for providing the music for this episode, you can find their track, Summer Silk and all their music at urbanpunks.com.

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